Corporate responsibility: bananas!

The NZ Herald yesterday carried Johann Hari’s comment piece from the Independent that gives the lie to the false maxim of the far-right that corporations only ever act in their own long-term interests and are therefore always to be trusted to do the right thing — say, with infrastructure, or GM science.

The answer to that bit of right-wing dogma is simple: bananas!

For those who haven’t caught up with what’s happening, the banana that we eat (i.e. the Cavendish) is a dying breed. That’s because the same multi-national that created the banana as we know it was so focused on the short-term maximisation of its shareholders’ returns that it couldn’t learn from its own mistakes.

As Johann Hari puts it:

“Is there a parable for our times in this odd milkshake of banana, blood and fungus? For a hundred years, a handful of corporations were given a gorgeous fruit, set free from regulation, and allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good entrepreneurial idea – and to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up killing the fruit itself.

But have we learned? Across the world, politicians like George Bush and David Cameron are telling us the regulation of corporations is “a menace” to be “rolled back”; they even say we should leave the planet’s climate in their hands. Now that’s bananas.”

Read the article and then buy Dan Koeppel’s brilliant book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.

[Footnote: the brilliant comedian Redbaiter has described Johann Hari as “extreme leftist Johann Hari (of all the most loathsome people)”. In fact, Hari is a “European social democrat”, who believes that markets are “an essential tool to generate wealth” but must be matched by strong democratic governments and strong trade unions (wikipedia), a republican, atheist, prison reformer, etc. A man after my own heart (politically).]

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Tags: bananas, right-wing dogma